Easy Homemade Fudge

I love fudge at Christmas. Maybe that's the reason why I'm no longer a size 2? Hmm... probably. For years, my Grandma made fudge. She always added the marshmallow fluff, and used the recipe on the back of the fluff jar. It always tasted great.

My Grandma has since passed away. This will be our 4th Christmas without her, and I still miss her just as much now as I did then. I still have dreams of her, though, and I feel this is her way of still being with me.

This year, my mother and I got together and did candied items for Christmas. We spent around 6 hours baking and cooking, dipping, dropping, hardening, and breaking things apart. One of the items we made was fudge. My mom's recipe was a lot different (and easier) than the one my Grandma always made.

Festive Fudge (I added the festive part, to make it sound all holiday-ish)

You'll need:
A pot
A wooden spoon
A Jelly Roll pan or cake pan (a jelly roll is a cookie sheet with edges, in case you were wondering!)
Wax paper (to line the pan with, so the fudge won't stick to the bottom)
1 regular size package of baking chips- chocolate, peanut butter, etc.
1 14 ounce can of Sweetened Condensed Milk

Dump the chips & milk into a pot, and start warming it. Stir every few minutes until it starts to become liquid. Once it starts to liquify, stir constantly, so as not to scorch the chocolate. When it's completely melted, pour into a wax paper covered pan, and let cool.

We usually stick the fudge in the garage, since it's cold here this time of year.

You can double the recipe. In fact, one of our favorites is to use 1 bag of chocolate chips, and 1 bag of peanut butter chips, to make a chocolate peanut butter fudge.

Good luck!

Cheap Groceries!

This week, I put my coupon skills to use. I used to do this all the time, but will admit, I fell off the wagon and stopped when we moved south. After some nudging, I've just recently gotten back into it. For two shopping trips, I've gotten $77.08 worth of groceries, and only spent $14.02 on it!

Here's what all I got for $14.02:

15 cans of Campbell's soup- ranged in sale price from $.68 to $.99
3 loaves of Pepperidge Farm bread- on sale for $2.49
4 bags of Voila meals- on sale for $2.99
2 Sara Lee Pumpkin Cheesecakes- $6.99
2 Deli Creations Sandwiches- $2.50
4 cans of Swanson's Broth- on sale for $.69
1 gallon of Milk- on sale for $2.19 (it just went up- sadness!)
1 can of Spaghetti-o's- on sale for $.49
1 package of Hamburger Buns- on sale for $1.29
1 20 ounce soda (it was an impulse purchase, I admit it, but boy was I thirsty!)- $.98 + $.10 deposit
1 30-count package of Halloween rings (another impulse buy)- $1.49

I got both cheesecakes completely FREE with the purchase of 2 Chicken Voila meals (each- 4 meals = 2 cheesecakes). I had coupons for 2 free Deli Creations (otherwise, they are too pricey at $2.50 each for a sandwich that won't fill a person up!). The broth cost me $.09 each.

For buying 4 cans of broth, I got a $1 coupon towards my next purchase. For each of the 5 soups/1 bread combo, I got a $5 coupon towards my next purchase.

I broke my trips up into 2 transactions each, to get the best deal, because the soup & bread was only good once per transaction. I wound up with $16 in coupons from the shopping trips, which helped whittle away the costs.

On top of all this, I had coupons for the soup each time, for both sets of Voila meals, for the broth, and the cheesecakes.

All in all, the soup won't last us a terribly long time. When we have soup together, we use 2-3 cans for the 5 of us. With all the great sale prices on soup lately, we've had it on the menu twice a week. It's my fall-to, cheap meal.

What's a fall-to, cheap meal? It's the meal I make when I have no desire to cook, and thoughts of McDonalds or Little Caesar's enter my mind. It's faster than running out to grab food, and certainly cheaper!

If I use 3 cans of the $.68 soup, and half a loaf of bread, and 5 slices of cheese, it costs me roughly $3.82- without calculating in the coupons used. I wound up saving $.80 off 4 cans of soup today when I bought the $.68 cans. That makes them $.48 each, instead of $.68, so it would cost me more like $3.22 for a family of 5 to eat a sandwich & can of soup. That's a mere $.64 per person!

You can't even buy a cheeseburger at McDonalds for that price. The $5 pizza's at Little Caeser's are nice, but we go through 2 of them in a sitting- that's $2 per person! If we stuck to JUST a $1 cheeseburger at McDonalds, that's $1 per person. Except that those rinky dink things certainly aren't filling, so we add in fries, or we break out more food when we get home.

Eating can be expensive. It can also be cheap, it's all in how you eat, and how you shop.